Pierre de Ronsard | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 20 pages of analysis & critique of Pierre de Ronsard.

Pierre de Ronsard | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 20 pages of analysis & critique of Pierre de Ronsard.
This section contains 5,279 words
(approx. 18 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Catharine Randall

SOURCE: “Poetic License, Censorship and the Unrestrained Self: Ronsard's Livret de folastries,” in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 45, 1996, pp. 449-62.

In the following essay, Randall describes the trangressive and pornographic qualities of Ronsard's Livret de folastries.

I. Making Free with the Text: Ronsard, La Fontaine and a Voice from Vice

One of the ways in which freedom of expression can be measured is through an examination of poetic license taken. “Poetic license” implies a censoring body, one overseeing the norms of expression. When censorship is ignored, or when limits are stretched, usually consciously (since poetry's very idiom—its formalism—renders an unconscious violation of norms fairly inconceivable), a politics develops and is demonstrated in that verse. This poetic politics mandates as privileged “licensing agency” the self, rather than the state.

In mid-sixteenth century France, while censorship was not explicitly codified, the standard of the...

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This section contains 5,279 words
(approx. 18 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Catharine Randall
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Critical Essay by Catharine Randall from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.